Posts by Joe Wylie
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Hard News: The Sky is the limit, in reply to Matthew Hooton,
I still don’t understand why these glamor convention centers are so important
Because politicians get to cut the ribbons at their openings. This is what drives all “commercial” activity by the public sector.
So who might Auckland's Francis de Groot be? There's no lack of potential candidates among the Len Brown haters.
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Son of Dad:
John Barry’s 1964 biography of psychotic 19th century Norfolk Island prison governor John Giles Price was also fascinating.
A character I recall from the late Roberts Hughes' marvelous The Fatal Shore. Appreciate the heads up, will definitely follow through on that.
hamishm:
I didn’t know he had done that Joe. That is surprising.
According to someone who's called on him in India Dalrymple's highly approachable and generous with his time. I've been very taken with his work since discovering him via From the Holy Mountain. His grand historical works such as The Last Mughal and Return of a King remind me of Hughes' The Fatal Shore in their enormous sweep and wealth of human insight.
One I enjoyed beyond my expectations - Robert Gordon's Respect Yourself: Stax Records and the Soul Explosion.
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Hard News: We're in this together, in reply to ,
Respect, Deborah, for volunteering to do the tough stuff.
A+
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Hard News: We're in this together, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Our radio are so much more independent these days, they don’t need the PM to write their copy for them.
Khrist that shirt's vile.
About Savage's supposedly draconian control of the media, maybe a little context would help. -
Busytown: Tell You What: A Nonfiction Giveaway!, in reply to hamishm,
My favourite non-fiction read this year was “Return of a King” by William Dalrymple.
It’s a phenomenal book. One thing that surprised me was Dalrymple’s apparently reactionary take on the Scottish independence referendum. He appeared to assume that the class privilege he’d enjoyed applied to all Scots, while ignoring the colonial heavy lifting carried out on Britain’s behalf by generations of his less fortunate countrymen.
As much of this is depicted in his remarkable works on South Asian history, it’s all the more surprising that his outsider’s objectivity seems to fail when his subject is closer to home.
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Hard News: Word of the Year 2014: #dirtypolitics, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
he really did like PA’s sandpit, for whatever reasons, he obviously misses it.
But what is it about ‘doesn’t play well with others’ that those ‘players’ can’t understand?
Hell is other people, eh…Perhaps he still misses the DimPost, where his stultifyingly stolid antics once clogged the place like a rampant quagga mussel infestation. While it doesn't take a qualified professional to spot that something's amiss in the cognitive department, he's now village idiot in absentia at disability-friendly PAS.
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Access: Some aspects of New Zealand's…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
At Kimberley and other places, as Robert Martin reports in his book, Becoming a person, there were also some good people with the best of intentions. Some were in official roles and some were just kind staff. But the systems were set up to oppress them all.
I’m sure that similar claims were made about institutions such as the old Templeton at the time Kimberley was established. The burden of placing those with behavioural issues into the community falls disproportionately on those with lower incomes, and we continue to jail people with real disabilities while stigmatising them as ‘dumb crims’. No revolution has occurred to fully banish oppression, the need for reform is ongoing.
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Access: Some aspects of New Zealand's…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
The Donald Beasley Institute in Dunedin evaluated the whole process from the perspectives of staff, families and residents and the reports are on their website if anyone cares to read them.
Thanks Hilary, I'm still working my way through the material. While it relates to a later period than what affected me - my dad retired from Kimberley in the late 1970s - the thoroughness is pretty impressive. I must say I'm dismayed to discover that a significant proportion of effectively untrained people were working at Kimberley at the time of its closure.
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Hard News: Word of the Year 2014: #dirtypolitics, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
You do realise the NZ Police and security forces (and their masters) have absolutely no sense of humour…
Yep. The sequence outside the courtroom in Operation 8: Into the Forest, where a member of the police prosecution team insists that the freshly exonerated ‘terrorists’ are still guilty as hell of 'something' as far as he’s concerned, is deeply creepy.
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Access: Some aspects of New Zealand's…, in reply to Hilary Stace,
Yes, I was too young back then to be aware of that stuff. Another thing I wonder about was how much formal support was in place for those who'd been 'released' into the wider world. I recall adults discussing stuff like how they'd called on someone on Christmas day and found him eating baked beans, with the suggestion that it was more down to ignorance than deprivation. What I don't know is whether that kind of follow-up was over to the initiative of individuals, or part of an organised outreach.